LEBANON — A steady number of people stopped by the Upper Valley Senior Center on Tuesday to pick up banana boxes filled with bags of food and insulated bags containing hot meals. The late-morning sun was shining, and the volunteers were set to deliver 79 meals to area residents.
Among the volunteers was Janet Simmons, who picked up a weekly route three months ago.
“There’s something about the pandemic that made me want to get closer to people and do that volunteer work,” said Simmons, an Etna resident and stay-at-home mom who has previously helped area nonprofits with fundraisers.
Simmons said everyone she encounters on her route is “so sweet and so thankful.” Delivering meals is a small gesture that holds a big meaning, and after hearing about the volunteer driver shortage in Lebanon, Simmons decided to sign up.
“Bottom line is I know I have the time, so I can use it in a helpful way,” she said.
Lebanon has had a home-delivered meals program since 1972, the year the Older Americans Act Nutrition Program, which provides funding for home-delivered and congregate meals in group settings, went into law. As the program celebrates its 50th anniversary, area Meals on Wheels providers have been discussing how to make the program sustainable for the next half-century as Northern New England’s population continues to age. Volunteers, funding and space are among some of the challenges shared by senior centers, which are largely responsible for organizing home-delivered meals.
“The trend line just keeps growing, and the needs keep growing,” said Bill Geraghty, vice president of the Grafton County Senior Citizens Council’s board of directors, during a Monday interview at the Lebanon ServiceLink Center.
The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the need for such services as numbers of recipients rose to new highs. As congregate meal sites closed, more people signed up for home-delivered meals. Even taking that into account, the numbers continued to grow, said Deanna Jones, director of the Thompson Senior Center in Woodstock, where volunteers delivered 11,247 meals in 2021. That was down from 2020, where 12,296 meals were delivered to residents of Barnard, Bridgewater, Pomfret and Woodstock.
“Meals on Wheels is still up 15% what it was pre-pandemic,” Jones said in a recent phone interview, and the program has grown by 65% in the last decade. Thompson’s home-delivered meals program started in 1978.
Additionally, staff provided 5,222 curbside to-go meals and distributed 3,268 meals from Vermont’s Everyone Eats program.
Inflation and supply chain shortages have also affected meal providers. Beyond the ingredients, takeout containers, trays and bags have also become more expensive, Jones said. Meals at the Thompson are now $16 each. That raw food and supply cost per meal has risen 22%.
“That’s absolutely the highest it’s ever been,” Jones said. “The supply, the continuity of supplies, is pretty erratic at this point. It really requires a lot of good planning and substitutions.”
The Thompson Center’s recent St. Patrick’s Day meal illustrated the challenge.
“Between the increased price up $1.32 a pound and the increased need to cover all the meals, we spent $716 this year on our corned beef alone for St. Patrick’s Day dinner versus $358 and $420 in the two years prior,” Jones wrote in an email. Packing costs went up 8% – and the center needs more of it because they also offer a takeout option.
All meals have to follow nutrition guidelines set forth by the Older Americans Act, which can make substitutions difficult: If the meals do not follow the guidelines, providers risk losing federal funding. Also per the act, recipients cannot be charged for meals, although they can be asked to donate. The Thompson Center receives $4.74 in federal funding per meal. The rest comes from town governments and fundraising efforts. Recipients donate an average of $2 per meal.
“The average reimbursement rate and average donation combined covers less than half of the cost of the meal,” Jones wrote in an email.
Federal relief funding approved by lawmakers during the pandemic provided the Thompson Center with an additional $1.40 extra per meal from March to December 2020, and for meals from October 2021 to December 2021..
“We dip into capital reserve funds every year, even before COVID,” Jones said. “The way the funding works, we cannot charge. We have to do more fundraising.”
In 2012, the center served 5,824 home-delivered meals. That amount has nearly doubled in the last decade. In the first 12 weeks of 2022, the center has served 3,302 home-delivered meals.
Other senior centers are seeing similar trends. In fiscal year 1998, the Grafton County Senior Citizens Council’s eight senior centers — including locations in Lebanon, Canaan, North Haverhill and Orford — delivered 109,789 meals, according to figures provided by Kathleen Vasconcelos, executive director of the Grafton County Senior Citizens Council. In fiscal year 2021, that number was 153,713, marking a 40% increase over 23 years. But even before the pandemic, numbers were on the rise: From 2010 to 2019, the number of recipients rose 11%.
“That means more fundraising and more creativity to stretch things,” Vasconcelos said during an interview last Monday at Lebanon ServiceLink Center.
Meals at all eight senior centers cost $9 and federal funding accounts for $6. Currently, they’re on track to stay within in the state contract that provides the federal funding, but “we are closely watching the home-delivered meals numbers,” Vasconcelos wrote in an email.
But the circumstances that allow the healthy budgeting are likely temporary.
“It’s all because of the pandemic. I don’t anticipate that in the future,” Vasconcelos said, later adding that since centers aren’t serving congregate meals, they’ve been able to use that funding for home-delivered and grab-and-go meals. As congregate meals start to resume this spring, staff at the centers expect the number of meals served “to quickly rise.” Congregate meals are expected to return, and home-delivered meals are expected to keep increasing, in line with trends seen before the pandemic. The centers will also continue serving grab-and-go meals.
“Many of the people who receive grab-and-go meals did not previously attend meals at our senior centers, so it’s not just a matter of shifting from one program to the other,” Vasconcelos wrote in an email. “It’s going to be an increase.”
In 2019, the council made the difficult decision to cut dessert from its menus to bring down the cost of each meal. They also receive donations from the New Hampshire Food Bank and Willing Hands, which they’re able to incorporate into meals. Donations that don’t fit in with the nutrition standards can be delivered as an add-on.
The council has stepped up its fundraising efforts, including launching a $1 million capital campaign in honor of the 50th anniversary. With more of its budget going to its basic services such as nutrition and transportation, there is little left over for other needs.
“Meanwhile things like facilities improvement, technology … are deferred,” Vasconcelos said.
Facilities — and space — are the main concern for Mark Bradley, executive director of the White River Council on Aging and Bugbee Senior Center in White River Junction. In the past five years, the number of meals has risen from 1,000 to more than 1,500 per month.
“The trend is only going up,” Bradley said. “That’s a big challenge that we’re facing. We’re getting close to the number of meals that our kitchen can produce.”
Recently, he purchased a new convection oven and commercial freezers to increase capacity for frozen meals.
“There’s only so many ovens and people you can fit in the kitchen, so at some point we’re going to run out of space,” Bradley said. “More staff would not necessarily result in more meals because we would need more equipment essentially to keep up.”
Like other meal providers, Bradley emphasized that Bugbee is doing whatever it can to avoid starting a waitlist. That may mean delivering recipients a mix of frozen and hot meals, instead of a hot meal five days a week. Hartford, Norwich and Thetford residents make up the majority of those who receive home-delivered meals from Bugbee.
“It would be nice if we could open another meal site in Norwich to cover the northern routes, but I’m not sure how sustainable that would be,” Bradley said. “We have a lot of work to do on that front.”
Like the Thompson Center, the price per meal is $16. The cost has gone up around $2 in the past year, which Bradley attributes to packaging.
“We’re hoping that funding will either catch up with costs or costs will come down at some point,” Bradley said. “It’s just been every year after year more people needing to go on the service.”
According to data from the national Meals on Wheels America, the average cost of meal in Vermont was $11.88 in 2020. Jones, who leads the group Vermont Association of Senior Centers and Meal Providers, said there has been some talk of meal providers joining forces for bargaining power to purchase supplies. Currently, Bugbee and Thompson have their own contracts with suppliers. Funds in Vermont are disbursed by Vermont’s Area Agencies on Aging. In Hartford and Woodstock, the area agency is Springfield, Vt.-based Senior Solutions.
“I think Meals on Wheels programs have to create appealing menus and appealing meals for people to continue to want to get them,” Jones said. “In order for programs to be able to do that, they need to be able to invest in good quality food and good quality staff to be able to produce those meals. I’d like to see more direct way of funding the meal providers themselves.”
In Lebanon, many volunteer drivers who were older and at higher risk for developing complications from COVID-19 stepped back from their routes. Prior to the pandemic, hot meals were delivered five days a week. In Lebanon, volunteers deliver hot meals two days a week, with a third to be added soon, said Jay Welenc, who just started as the center’s home-delivered meals coordinator. Volunteers now deliver a combination of hot and frozen meals.
Welenc has reworked some of the routes so that volunteers can take on more recipients. Other volunteers have stepped up to deliver more than one day a week, including Liam Coyle, who has been delivering meals for around two years.
“I enjoy meeting them, talking to them,” Coyle, of Lebanon, said Tuesday of his route’s recipients as he picked up meals to deliver. His route takes about an hour to complete, depending on how long he stays at each stop. “It’s a good opportunity to help the community.”
Upper Valley Senior Center Director Jill Vahey said finding people to volunteer has become a much greater challenge over her 20 years in the role.
“If someone dropped off, she always had a backup and a sub,” Vahey said of her predecessor during an interview last Monday at Lebanon ServiceLink.
That isn’t the case anymore.
“I think people are working longer and because there’s so many opportunities in the Upper Valley as well, we have a lot of competition for volunteer help,” Vahey said. In addition to volunteers, the center is short on kitchen staff and bus drivers.
During the pandemic, volunteers were delivering more than just meals: They were picking up prescriptions, bringing over library books and making sure recipients had essentials like toilet paper. On days when meals aren’t delivered, staff make calls for wellness checks.
“Every day we have one of the drivers call back and say they didn’t see so and so and they were concerned about how someone looked,” Jones said. “It’s a check-in. It’s just as critical as the meal.”
John Matthews, of Woodstock, started delivering meals for the Thompson Center almost a dozen years ago. He does one route every Thursday where he visits six or seven people in Barnard and Woodstock. It takes him about an hour and is roughly 20 miles round-trip.
“I was trying to find some socially good thing to do and I think I had a friend who was driving at one point, and that sort of got me into it,” Matthews, 86, said. “It’s a satisfying thing to do and I’ve made some friends of people on my route. They’re appreciative of the service.”
Matthews said the biggest challenge is when snow and ice make the path from his car to recipients’ doors slippery.
Both Jones and Bradley said volunteer numbers have remained strong in the towns they serve.
Bugbee has 40 volunteer drivers that cover six routes. Some drivers do more than one shift a week. The Thompson Center has six routes and drivers deliver around 50 meals per day, Monday to Friday with frozen meals for the weekend. During the pandemic, they jumped from five to seven routes, but are now at six.
“We’ve been really fortunate that we’ve never had a problem covering any of the routes,” Bradley said. “People in our area are really enthusiastic about the program. Even during the pandemic, none of them left.”
Liz Sauchelli can be reached at esauchelli@vnews.com or 603-727-3221.
